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This thesis focuses on Ng Kim Chew’s fictions published between 1986 and 2016 to explore the “Father” image represented there. Based on an intensive reading, this research teases out from Ng’s migration experience the themes of “Kinship Father,” “National Father,” and “Revolutionary Father” as the main points of discussion, and places his works under the three headings above as a response to the problematic of the “Father” image Ng proposes.
In the chapter “On the ‘Kinship Father’: Life in the Rubber Tree Plantation and Homeland Memory,” the “Father” image comes in three kinds: the “Wanderer’s Father,” the “Lost Father,” and the “Father in Memory,” each of which represents the wanderer’s feelings toward his homeland, the son’s mourning for his deceased father, and the compensation he makes in literary imagination. In the chapter “On the ‘National Father’: Predicament and Resolution,” the emotional flow created by the three “Abdullahs” in Ng’s fictions is discussed, where we see how the “non-national” and “non-Muslim” identities are granted to the characters. In the process, they experience a loss of political identity; the attendant process of slowly losing one’s family and national ties is hidden within. The chapter “On the ‘Revolutionary Father’: Survival Stories of the Day After” is divided into the “Father of the Day After,” the “Father in the Virtual Reality of Words,” and the “Father who Returns to Reality.” Here the stories about the loss of faith when facing various incidents in life in a twisted manner are discussed.
This thesis employs the themes of “Kinship Father,” “National Father,” and “Revolutionary Father” to delve into the meaning of the “Father” image in Ng Kim Chew’s fictions to inquire how a vision that comprises the significance of family ties, the consciousness of national identity, and the transcendental faith in the literary is given rise. The “Father” image in Ng Kim Chew’s fictions is the basis upon which the ideal of a son, a citizen, and a writer as Ng rests. The “father in absentia” thus signals the disappearance of homeland and belonging, the fall of citizen status, and the loss of faith in the literary, all of which circle around the issue of belongingness of the Malaysian Chinese subjectivity.
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